The Manor Read Online Free PDF

twist before going off to hibernate. Ain't no ssssnakes in here, Georgie." George thought of that old Johnny Cash song, about how the snakes crawl at night. But the song had it wrong. Snakes slept at night because they were cold-blooded. George knew, because he'd looked it up. George gulped again, trying to squeeze a little of that mountain air into his bruised lungs. A small drop of liquid fell between his eyes. More blood collected at the ruined wrist hanging above him. The swelling tear-drop of blood dangled from the end of a stringy bit of tendon. He wondered if the hand was his left one or his right one.
    "Hell of a wonderer you are, Georgie. But I'll tell you, since you've always needed to know things. It's the old hammerer, the crap-wiper, the hand that shook the hand of Senator Hallifield at that Republican bar-becue in Raleigh. Yep, them fingers there used to grip the two-seamer curve ball that took you fourteen-and-three back in your senior year. Them are the knuckles that got one good sock to the jaw of that hippie Selma run off with. But, hey, it's dead weight now. Water under the bridge. Let's worry about the meat that's stil attached."
    George wished he could feel his feet. Then he wouldn't be so afraid that he was turning into one of those puppyfish. Something inside his crushed gut spasmed and gurgled. With every shalow breath, broken rib bones reached deeper into his chest for a scoop of fresh or-gans. And who did he have to blame?
    "Nobody but you and that snoopy nose of yours, soldier. Just got to poke into things that ain't none of your business. Just got to goddamned know, don't you? Always did, and always will. But if you don't get off that fat rump of yours, always ain't even going to last till sundown." Sure, George liked to know things. He wanted to know why dragonflies were caled "snakefeeders." He wanted to know why Selma had worked the springs of their old brass bed with a flea-ridden liberal longhair. He wanted to know why that picture of Ephram Korban that hung in the manor gave him seven kinds of creeps. He wanted to know why that old bat Abigail and his buddy Ransom had warned him away from this neck of the woods. Most of all, he wanted to know why the Woman in White had been dancing in the shed the mo-ment before it fell down around him.
    "Ain't no earthly good dwelling on what you can't figure out," came the distant voice of Old Leatherneck. "You'd best get back to the situation at hand, if you know what I mean." Another drop of blood plopped onto his face, this time on his chin. George started to reach up and wipe it away, then was reminded that the arm that did his wip-ing was severed at the wrist. Pain lanced up his shoul-der, as bright and yelow red as Napalm.
    George squinted through the jagged and crisscrossed lumber overhead. A few muted shafts of light spilled through the rubble, dust swirling slowly in the air. That meant a bit of daylight was left. Time had taken on a weird, stretched-out quality, kind of like in Nam when the grunts hunkered down for incoming even before the first mortars whistled through the air.
    "Hey, Georgie, give me a litle credit here. I puled you out of that mess, didn't I? So don't give up on me yet. But I need a little help. You've got to have a little goddamned hope." Hope. Hope got you up in the morning. Hope put you to bed and tucked you in. Hope was the last thing you held on to when everything else was gone. The thought chiled George, or it may have been the cold sweat that covered his face.
    "I'm holding on," George whispered. He usually didn't talk back to Old Leatherneck. He figured only crazy people talked back to the voices inside their heads. But then, there sure were a hel of a lot of crazy people around Korban Manor. Ransom Streater claimed to see people who weren't there, or those who had passed on long before. George wished one of them would have a vision now, do that Sight thing Abigail was always going on about, see him trapped under the old